A Favor Economy in Which Kind Acts Come With Expected Reciprocity

The favor bank might include putting in a good word for a friend's child, getting into a fancy restaurant or even writing a Follow Friday post on Twitter.Credit
Lisa Larson-Walker

Some years ago, I had a friend who moved to New York with various aspirations, and until they were fulfilled he supported himself working at a restaurant. The place was cultish and bohemian — artists had started it — and interesting people worked there. Eventually my friend got to know the daughter of a famous actor there. On various occasions, he ate out with this woman and her father, noticing that when they did, the bill rarely arrived. This led my friend to one of his most astute and enduring observations about New York: “Only rich people eat for free.”

In the minds of the restaurant owners, the presence of a celebrity, at a time before every third person laid claim to the designation, was payment enough. Perhaps the celebrity would tell other celebrities to come to the restaurant; perhaps, feeling obliged to do something more, the actor would insist to reporters that he be interviewed there, ensuring that the name of the restaurant would appear in magazines and newspapers. Perhaps regular people, awed by proximity to a famous person eating sea bass, would return with greater frequency. In any event, a restaurant offering a free meal to someone who could easily pay for it was clearly hoping for a certain yield, in a form of tender even more valuable than a bitcoin.

The favor economy — the performance or receipt of gestures, services and kind acts often with the implicit expectation of reciprocity — has quite likely been a driving force of life in New York at least since the days of the New Amsterdam colony. But we roll now in ways the Dutch could not have foreseen. If it is possible to tell the social history of modern, upper-class Manhattan in the evolution of the needlepoint pillow, then it is worth noting that on the Upper East Side, where we once might have found an aphorism like “Eat, Drink and Remarry,” today we might find one that reads, “You Don’t Know How Many Friends You Have ... Until You Have a Helicopter.”

The rise of a money culture, which has made the excesses of even the ’80s seem comparatively quaint, and the heightened competition for status and access that has attended it mean that in New York today, if you belong to a certain caste, you will spend a lot of your time incurring nonmonetary debts and servicing them.

The supremely rich are exempt from many of these exchanges because they can often buy their way into whatever it is they want, while the merely affluent or well-to-do must rely on fellowship, sincere or perverted, to move through their agendas.

Photo

Where once an Upper East Side resident’s needlepoint aphorism might have read, “Eat, Drink and Remarry,” today we might find a different message stitched into a pillow.Credit
Lisa Larson-Walker

“Everything now has become so desperate, desperate, desperate,” Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., the author of “Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America,” said to me recently, an old-guard patrician’s lament of the current deteriorating ways.

A more benign interpretation of the favor economy is that it has a spiritual dimension: that favors done may be repaid indirectly through the various karmic recourses.

In either case, you find yourself writing a letter of recommendation for admission to a private school that receives 36 applications for every available space, or you are in need of such a letter. You are helping someone you know get into a club (a literal or figurative one), partly because you like the person and partly because her father is on the board of an organization where you would like your 22-year-old child to work. You want a reservation at a restaurant that doesn’t take any and is always packed so you call a friend, with whom you once generously shared everything you know about chess teachers for 5-year-olds, who has an acquaintance who works at the Food Network.

This last example falls under the category of what the writer and performer Jenny Allen calls the compound favor: “It’s not just that you have to write the letter or do x, but that to do those things you have to email a third person who is in London until Tuesday.”

Ms. Allen is the sort of person of whom many requests are made. For years, she had a vast apartment on the Upper West Side, which left friends repeatedly asking her if they could use it to throw book parties for other friends. She always said yes, she told me, because she felt that as a person with a rare commodity, ample square feet in Manhattan, she had a moral duty to comply.

But in some sense the cosmos has given back. Having recently sold her apartment and temporarily moved to Massachusetts, Ms. Allen now relies on the guest rooms and sofas of friends when she comes to the city. (When she feels she has abused this privilege she takes a room at a Super 8 on Third Avenue in Brooklyn.)



The guest room is a source of many unspoken transactions in a place where the average nightly rate of a hotel room is $281, and where it is very easy to spend twice that. One friend recently recounted the experience of hosting a longtime television producer at her townhouse in Brooklyn two weekends in a row. This, she said, provided her with the perfect situation to get him to read a treatment she had written for a television pilot and to give her detailed notes.

“It wasn’t premeditated,” as she put it, “but the arrangement worked out nicely.”

The favor economy offers various levels of participation. Some engage in it almost by default or exclusively among friends, while others apply a fierce determination and calculus.

“There’s an implied gamble in doing a favor for someone,” Euan Rellie, an investment banker and impassioned enthusiast of Manhattan social life, told me recently. “You need to pick the right horse to back. We’re all monitoring who’s hot, who’s not. And predicting who we’ll like, and who will do well. We carefully back a mixture of youth, beauty, humor, wit and confidence — as well as the more obvious wealth and power.”

There is a vast collection of academic literature examining relationships grounded in gift exchange, beginning most significantly with the work of Marcel Mauss, a French anthropologist who in the 1920s examined archaic societies and argued that entrenched obligations to give, receive and reciprocate, though often self-serving, are crucial instruments in the creation and maintenance of social systems and solidarity. Decades later, in 1999, the economist W. S. Neilson, writing in The Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, used two-player game-theory models to look at favor exchanges more specifically and concluded, in contrast to Mauss, that favors did not oblige their recipients to act in kind toward their donors.

Suggesting a darker view, Mr. Neilson described the idea of owing or returning a favor as “inaccurate.” He said players did not perform favors because of what happened in the past, but because of what they anticipated would happen in the future. “It is entirely possible for an individual to perform a favor without having received any favors in the past,” he wrote, “as long as the individual was not supposed to have received any favors in the past.”

The current favor economy achieves at least some of its power from our ever enfeebled immunities to shame. When everyone is forced to become a brand, everyone requires relentless promotion. So you tweet the accomplishments of distasteful colleagues because if you don’t, they might not tweet yours, and somehow, despite your resistance, you’ve been sold on the notion that you ought to take measure of yourself in terms of 140-character assessments made by people you only vaguely know.

In the broader sense, digital culture has freed us from some of the inhibitions that during more genteel, electronically constrained times might have made it more difficult to ask for things.

Photo

A motto behind the favor economy that is not explicitly stated.Credit
Lisa Larson-Walker

Not long ago, I noticed in my Facebook feed a request for money for someone I didn’t know, a seemingly middle-aged Manhattan professional and father whose friends had created a fund-raising campaign, via the website GiveForward, to help him move to Cambridge, Mass., to be closer to his children, whose mother had taken them there after their marriage broke up. (More typically the site’s users devote themselves to campaigns for people with serious illnesses.)



Filial obsession spurs the favor economy along, too, to the extent that upper-middle-class parents ferociously pursue their children’s academic and professional advancement. Claire Silberman, a former lawyer and a prominent Brooklyn philanthropist, made the point to me recently that parents asking for things on behalf of their children often don’t even consider their requests to be in the realm of self-interest. “There’s the I’ll do anything for my kid favor,” she said. Having recently met a photographer whom she hoped to connect with a publisher, she couldn’t help asking if she might be in need of an intern, thinking of her son who loved taking pictures.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

By current standards it would have constituted a failure of maternal sanity to do otherwise.

Ms. Silberman is not a thoughtless participant in these exchanges; in fact, she has developed an entire taxonomy of favors. The favor categories she has devised include “the redirected favor.” This occurs when someone comes to you for a favor and you pass that person on to someone who might easily provide it.

The “qualified favor” occurs, for example, when you pass on a résumé to an employer from someone you know, with the stipulation that that is as far as you will go.

The “double beneficiary favor” can mean successfully connecting someone looking for a job with someone looking to fill a position. This comes with the additional benefit of gratifying the ego of the person who has forged the connection.

Ms. Silberman considers herself a pre-emptive offerer of favors — she typically offers networking — though she realizes that sometimes the intended recipient may not even want her help. The favor she asks in return is simply that she be allowed to “pontificate,” as she says, about the various progressive causes to which she is committed.

The obvious criticism of the favor economy as it plays out in New York is that it solidifies and regenerates privilege, or as Michael M. Thomas, a former financier, put it to me, “The Favor Bank has, like every other bank of substance in the country, been run principally for the entertainment of its management.”

And of course, the trafficking is especially pernicious when it infects those aspects of life where it should have no place — when you need a well-connected friend to call a prominent doctor to more quickly obtain an appointment. “In the old days you would just call the office and cry,” as Angela Westwater, a longtime Manhattan art gallery owner, said.

Alternatively, the New York charity circuit would hardly exist without its abiding practice of quid pro quo, the quiet agreement that if you have convinced a friend to contribute to the experimental theater or food pantry or preservation group you support, you must write a check and get dressed up and go to her event for saving monk seals even if you don’t care at all about monk seals. “It’s fully understood that you buy the same level of table” — $10,000, $20,000 and so on — “that they bought for you,” Holly Peterson, a longtime Upper East Side resident, told me. “People notice if they have done something very generous for you and they’ve only gotten 10 percent back.”

In a larger way, the greater good of philanthropy is served as well, Stacy Palmer, the editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, explained. The favor trade may expose new donors to causes that ultimately excite them, she said, and to which they may continue to make commitments over the years.

And yet despite that utility, the favor economy is really at its purest and most appealing when it makes New York feel like Vermont, when the fact that you introduced someone to a very good plumber means they send you the name of a very good chiropractor. Recently, a friend described the relationship that evolved between her husband and their contractor. At some point in the midst of her renovation, the two men smoked pot together. She realized that her contractor was suddenly taking on the kind of annoying tasks around the house — changing light bulbs, moving furniture — for which she was very grateful but hadn’t agreed to pay him. As it happened, her husband and the man had worked out a silent understanding in which the contractor would perform ancillary chores in exchange for what he called “medication.”

The rhetoric of the hour notwithstanding, our current narrative is not a tale of two cities, as Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio said so often this year. It is a tale of three or four. In one, a favor is lending someone some Pampers. In another, it means handing a joint to someone who will get on a ladder or giving the name of a babysitter to someone who waters your plants. In yet another, a favor means allowing a friend to bring a terrier on your Gulfstream.

“That’s a big one,” an Upper East Side resident told me.

Email: bigcity@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on December 22, 2013, on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Unimpeded by Shame, Our Favor Economy Thrives . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe